Thalia Learns to Cook: Pesto

Thalia learns to cook posts are recipes and examples of dishes I can now make! Taken from a variety of sources and changed according to my abilities, needs, and dislike of doing dishes.

This is the true story of a meal turned around, and I think very emblematic of how I’m learning to cook. My husband and I joined a CSA for the Spring and Summer. For the uninitiated and those not living in hipster/ liberal enclaves, a CSA is “Community Sponsored Agriculture” or Farm Share. Basically, you pay a farm a set fee at the beginning of the season, they use that money to get through the season, and then each week they deliver (or you pick up- individual results may vary) a bag of food!

Because of all the rain and cool weather this spring in CT, our food bags have been filled with greens. Many many greens. Bok choy, dandelion greens, spinach, carrots with a foot of greens attached, boston and romaine and other mixed lettuce, mizuna, basil, cilantro, parsley. So yeah, a lot of greens. In addition to the food, we also get a weekly email with a list of the ingredients and a few recipes that attempt to use some of the more esoteric deliveries. For instance, what do you do with a huge bunch of carrots attached to a huge-r bunch of greens?

The answer? Pesto! Being an unabashed white pasta lover, pesto makes me happy. It’s one of those things where if I see it on a menu at a restaurant, I’m hard pressed to order anything else. (What do you mean pesto-sun dried tomato combinations went out of style in the late 90’s? They’re so delicious!) So, bunches of carrot greens in hand, I decided to try pesto for the first time.

Cilantro Pesto (recipe from the Gazy Farms CSA email)
**Note: This can also be used with carrot greens, as you can see from the photos in this post.

Ingredients:
1 bunch fresh cilantro
(or 1 bunch carrot greens: but you have to boil the greens for 1 minute and let them
drain for 5 minutes before you start chopping them up for the food processor).
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 cup walnuts or pine nuts (I used a mix. Pine nuts are mega expensive).
Salt to taste 1/2 cup olive oil (plus more as needed)

Method: In an electric food processor or blender, blend cilantro, garlic, vinegar, Parmesan cheese, cayenne pepper, nuts, and salt. Add 1/4 cup of the olive oil, and blend the pesto. Add more olive oil until the pesto reaches your desired consistency.

Pour pesto in a small saucepan and warm over low heat, stirring constantly, until pesto begins to simmer. Serve over cooked pasta, or as a delicious spread.

-----

And here’s where the story goes terribly terribly wrong.

So, while I was pouring the olive oil into the blender, I thought to myself “wow, that’s awesome that the olive oil just cooks the garlic so you can eat the pesto raw.”

So, when I put the pesto into the pan to heat it up I did it minimally. As in, not long enough to cook the garlic to the point where it lost its raw garlic taste. Have you ever eaten raw garlic? Not pleasant. Worse, have you even been within breathing range of someone who just ate raw garlic? Even worse.

I then mix the not-at-all cooked pesto in with my delicious white spaghetti (no I will not apologize for not using wheat pasta. It’s not as good, so neener neener).

Then I taste it. Hmmmmmm… it tastes like raw garlic and not much else. None of the parmesean or cilantro or pine nut flavor comes through. It’s like chewing on raw garlic. Thinking that perhaps the olive oil just hasn’t had time to do its job, I serve it up on a plate and sit down to dinner.

Hmmmmm…. Says my patient husband…. It tastes like garlic and not much else. Did you cook it? He asks?
No! I try to explain, the olive oil cooks it! I don’t know why it didn’t work!

And this is when I get the look.

I’ve seen this look before. It starts out with a “wait what? This is a perfectly obvious error you are making, what kind of person make this error”… And then moves into a “oh yes, now I remember, you are still learning how to cook, so I should correct you, but gently” and then into “very gently” (because I might have burst into tears once or twice when first learning how to cook and making obvious mistakes in my early days.)

“You know Olive oil doesn’t cook garlic.”
“Huh?” I answer… “It’s like citrus! Or vinegar! It cooks….” oh wait.

Olive oil is the OPPOSITE of citrus or vinegar. Right. The opposite. It does not cook things. It just adds fat and richness. Right. OK. So, we put the whole thing, pesto and already fully cooked pasta together, back into the pan, and try to cook off some of the bite, while I attempt to figure out where this lack of knowledge seems to have slipped through. This is emblematic of my errors: I often don’t have the exact knowledge I need to make the dish work, so I either forge ahead and hope whatever I make up is correct (which works more now than it did at the beginning), or somehow I substitute knowledge from another source (citrus cooks ceviche) and put it out of context (oil cooks garlic?) to horrifying results.

But! A Happy Ending approaches:
A few weeks later, lesson learned, we received another recipe, this time for Spinach Basil Pesto:

Spinach Basil Pesto

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups baby spinach leaves
3/4 cup fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
4 cloves garlic, peeled and quartered
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Method:
Blend the spinach, basil, pine nuts, Parmesan cheese, garlic, salt, pepper, lemon juice, lemon zest, and 2 tablespoons olive oil in a food processor until nearly smooth, scraping the sides of the bowl with a spatula as necessary. Drizzle the remaining olive oil into the mixture while processing until smooth. (Notice how the recipes are pretty much identical?)

This time, I cooked the pesto fully in a pan before mixing it in to the pasta.

And this time, it was all I could do to not just eat the pesto with a spoon from the pan and finish and entire pound of pasta by myself. I held off, and it was amazing. See! Dreams do come true!